Before Alan Greenspan stood down from his chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul got him to sign a copy of Greenspan’s 1966 essay, “Gold and Economic Freedom” — originally written for the Objectivist newsletter — an essay which you can still find lurking within the Ayn Rand book, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal“.
Here’s a quote to tempt you to read the whole thing, which is almost prescient, given that today gold, silver, and copper all hit record highs:
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
The most amazing thing about this astounding essay, is that when Dr Paul got Rand’s “Undertaker” to autograph it, Greenspan said he still stood by every word. You can watch Dr Paul talk about this particular strange encounter in the very watchable Mises Media video below, at 32:00 minutes on the clock:
The lesson is thus clear. If you want to prevent Ben Bernanke and other central bank governors from stealing your life’s wealth, to benefit their masters in government, then do what central banks do and what Alan Greenspan implied you do; protect yourself with physical gold. And keep it out of the banking system, to prevent either outright Roosevelt-style confiscation or other dubious shenanigans.
